it’s a long while ago I posted here. If a blog don’t deliver content since 2 years, it’s dead ! And yes this blog is dead since 2 years. But I’m not dead and my DataCenter at Home (DCaH) project isn’t dead, too. My UCS, my NetApps and all other hardware are in great condition. 🙂 But my job changed and this is perhaps one reason why all my nice toys aren’t the middle of my life anymore. 😉 That’s life !

Don’t worry ! There are some changes on the horizon. 🙂 My future isn’t datacenter centric any more. I have to deal with software and software architectures. It’s cool and it’s very interesting. But my heart loves hardware. Now, there’s a big change in my life. I cannot stay in my current home and need a new one. I’ve – me and my family found – found a new one… and it has a nice cellar. 😉 A very nice cellar. 😀

As mentioned above I don’t need all that datacenter stuff for my job. But I don’t want to sell all my jewels. 🙂 And this is the beginning of a new chapter of this blog and of my DCaH project. 🙂

There are a lot of people who are working on a model railways. And I like to do the same, but not with railway toys! Why not build a model (mini) datacenter? 😉 Of course it’s a little bit outdated, but a model railway is outdated, too. 😉 I can spent my time on nice details and I can work on a perfect Home Datacenter. With fine cables, nice infrastructure and lot’s of other cool things. I’m so excited about this new project and I hope you will enjoy it. 🙂

My current plan is to start with my new project in 3 to 5 month. And I promise that I will deliver new content . 🙂 Lot’s of pictures, fun and a DataCenter at Home project that’s goal is not to be a current and modern, state-of-the-art datacenter, but a nice one. 🙂

Stay tuned, don’t expect guides and tips, but a nice journey to a perfect model mini datacenter at home. 😉

Good bye my amazing HP C7000 BladeSystem. I enjoyed you so many years, I installed many different servers into you and I run you thousands of hours. Thank you !!! I hope you like your new home.

After five years of HP experience in my Home-Lab, the HP era ends today. Maybe it’s a good time to change my entire blog, too. My last post is one year old and lot’s of visitors forgot my site. No wonder !

One thing I like to change is the language, again. My english is not very good and I have so many problems to explain and write down all my ideas. I’m sure that there are many other crazy people out there, who can help and inspire you with blogs in your preferred language. My wish is to change back to German. Please accept this decision.

If you see interesting images or snippets, but you don’t understand German. Feel free and write an email -> tschokko@gmx.de

If you think my Home-Lab is dead, you’re wrong ! 🙂 I love blades and on January 2015 I will present you my newest toy. 😉 Meanwhile have a good year, I’m sure you have enough work and visit my blog again. 🙂

More than one year passed since my last blog post. I’m really sorry about that, but my life has changed a little bit. My 3 years old daughter is a very time consuming little girl and she needs my attention. Playing with my home lab all the time is not possible. On the other hand I have a very money consuming car. The last 12 months I had so many expensive repairs, that no money remained for my home lab.

The good news are, I’m back and want to spent time again into my blog and home lab. The bad news are, that running some Unix servers with attached storage are no longer interesting for me. 😉 Thats why I’m not sure what kind of content I can offer you in the future. But it doesn’t matter now because I’m rebuilding my entire home lab currently. 🙂 Let’s talk a little bit about the rebuild.

As mentioned before I couldn’t spent money into my home lab the last months. The following picture shows my old and well-known setup.

But last Sunday a dream came true. I bought new racks for all my stuff. 🙂

These are 42 units tall Rittal TS8 racks with 80 cm (32 in.) width and 100 cm (40 in.) depth. Enough space to hold lot’s of nice hardware. Yesterday I leveled and connected the racks together and it looks awesome. What a crazy home lab !

Late at night I finished mounting my NetApp FAS3020 storage system. The very first piece of hardware in the new racks. 😉

I love the new racks and the new look of my home lab. Can’t wait until all my hardware is properly installed.

What’s next ? Well, I need several rack mount kits to install all the hardware, but they are expensive especially the Brocade kit for the SAN switches. Providing power is another costly intent, but a very nice subject for blogging. Least but not last I have some cool networking ideas. Enough material to reanimate my blog. 🙂

I hope you are visiting my homepage in the future again. 🙂 Thanks a lot and best regards… Tschokko

Currently I’m planing a Multi-Site Datacenter at home. 😉 I want to test some new technologies like Cisco VXLAN, Site-to-Site replication, VMotion over WAN, and and and. But I’m not a professionell networking guy and that’s why I’m not sure if my following network design is comparable with a real-world datacenter network. I don’t need any redundant component and network designs like a 2 or 3-tier network architecture (Core-Distribution-Access). My lab should be simple, but not too simple. 😉 Feel free to comment…

Some times ago I bought a STEC ZeusIOPS SSD with 18GB capacity. This disks comes out from a Sun ZFS Storage 7420 system. But it’s 3.5″ large and without a server which supports 3.5″ large SAS disk drives I couldn’t test the SSD. Today I was able to test the drive on a Fujitsu Primergy RX300 S5 server. I installed five 500 GB large SATA drives and my STEC ZeusIOPS SSD. The first disk contains an OpenIndiana installation, the rpool. The remaing four SATA drives are grouped as a ZFS RAIDZ2 pool. I exported a ZFS dataset over NFS and 1 GbE to a VMware ESX system. With a Ubuntu linux virtual machine I run several benchmarks.

The results without the SSD are 75-80 MBytes/s write (850ms latency), between 40 and 65 MBytes/s rewrite and 120 MBytes/s read performance. I did different runs with bonnie++ and iozone and achieved always similar values. During the tools did their benchmarks I watched the IO with „zfs iostat“. The write and rewrite results matched the numbers above. Reading lot’s of data from disk was not necessarry due a large enough ARC mem cache. That’s why the iostat output values was lower than 10 Mybtes/s.

Then I added the STEC SSD as log device to the ZFS pool and rerun all the tests. But I couldn’t believe the values!!! My benchmarks finished with only 45-50 MBytes/s write and 35-45 MBytes/s rewrite. Read performance didn’t changed, of course. The write latency exceeded 10000ms!!! Something went wrong but I don’t know what. I did the runs again and I watched the zfs iostat output parallel. But the output of zfs iostat throwed values always above 100 Mbytes/s. Sometimes I reached even values above 170 MBytes/s, but always more than 100 Mbytes/s. This is the maximum rate for a single 1 GbE connection! But the benchmark output was very different. They didn’t reached the results of the benchmark without the SSD. I was confused. I disabled the log device with the logbias option and set it to throughput. The benchmark result and the iostat results went back to 75-80 Mbytes/s write. I reenabled the log device with logbias=latency and I had again the benchmark result of max. 50 Mybtes/s write and big latency values but with an iostat ouput always over 100 Mbytes/s!

Let’s start blogging again. 🙂 A lots of time passed since I blogged interesting things. The main reason was, I decided to change my employer. The last weeks we moved our home, too. Now my little family is living in a suite little house, with a big garden, a big garage but no more big cellar. 😉 But I will talk about this circumstance some lines later.

Today I had my first day at qSkills. This is my new employer. 🙂 I’m working as an IT Architect and Software-Engineer. My first job is to design and implement an entire new network because the current network is very outdated. Maybe the new network is based on Cisco Nexus. 😉 It’s hot stuff and my new boss loves nice and cool toys. Me too! 😉 BTW. the company earns his money with professionel trainings and they have a strong relationship with Fujitsu and NetApp. In the dedicated training datacenter (nine 47U racks!) are lot’s of nice toys installed, predominantly Fujitsu servers and many NetApps storage systems of course. A very nice playground for lot’s of tests in addition to my private lab. 🙂 A good point to talk about my home lab.

My well known home data center is DEAD ! I moved everyting into the new garage, until I can start my new home lab idea. 😉 I’m not sure if I can pay the new idea this year, because the move to the new home was very expensive and I have a wife and little daughter who needs money too. But I can wait until next year. Meanwhile I’m running a tempory solution in the new cellar which is not big enough for a 2m tall rack. But it’s enough for playing and blogging about my experience, as you can see on the last picture. 😉 That’s why I hope you visit my blog, again…. 😀